Epilogue – Beck
Ten Years Later
“Iam doing pizza!”
“That's not pizza.”
“It looks like pizza.”
“It looks like two french fries.”
Nora glares at me from inside her helmet, skis wedged into the least convincing snowplow I've ever witnessed and at an angle that will not slow her down. I ski backward in front of her, watching her try to correct it.
“Beck, stop insulting her pizza.” Ivy skis up beside us, ten years of practice showing in every motion, which still catches me off guard sometimes, considering she spent most of a summer insisting skiing sounded like a terrible way to spend a winter.
“I'm not insulting it. I'm evaluating it.”
“Honey. She likes square cut slices.”
“Oh. I forgot. Make pie sweetie.”
Nora finally gets her skis into something resembling the shape I've been asking for, and I tell her so. She beams like I've handed her a medal instead of mild approval, which is the right amount of encouragement for an eight-year-old according to several parenting books Ivy's made me half-read.
Wyatt arrives a few minutes later, towed along by my father, moving with considerably more confidence than skill, which is a combination I recognize uncomfortably well.
“Dad said I could try the black diamond,” he announces to my father.
“I did not say that.”
“Uncle Reid said I could.”
I add call Reid to a mental list that's getting uncomfortably long this trip. “Uncle Reid isn't your father.”
“He said you're too cautious.”
I point at his helmet without breaking stride, right at the sticker. “That's the same Uncle Reid who convinced half of Timber Creek he saw Bigfoot. I wouldn't build a ski plan around his judgment.”
Wyatt considers this with seriousness, weighing the competing evidence. He doesn't concede the point, which tells me he's as stubborn as his mother.
His helmet's got a Bigfoot sticker peeling slightly at one corner.
Reid started all this with a onesie, years ago, the week Wyatt was born, WORLD'S HIDE-AND-SEEK CHAMPION — JUNIOR DIVISION stitched across the front in the same block letters as the original shirt he bought himself back before either kid existed.
Ivy blamed Reid. Reid blamed me. Neither of them is wrong.
The tradition's only escalated since, socks and patches and gaiters and, last Christmas, an actual stuffed Bigfoot roughly the size of Wyatt himself.
My mother appears, offering hot chocolate as bait, and Wyatt abandons the black diamond argument in favor of marshmallows, which tells me everything about his priorities. None of it surprises me. He’s six.
“Come on,” my mom says, herding both kids toward the lodge. “Give your parents a minute.”
Ivy and I ride the chairlift alone a while later, skis dangling, the whole valley spread out white and enormous below us, the same mountains I spent a handful of winters calling home before Blackpine happened.
“Miss it?” Ivy asks.
“Some of it.”
“The skiing?”
“Definitely.”
“Seasonal housing?”
“Not even a little.”
She laughs, and I think about how different this version of the mountains feels than the one I used to know, a vacation now instead of a whole winter, something I visit instead of something I disappear into.
“Would you ever want to spend a whole season out here again?” she asks.
I consider it honestly, the pull of the mountain still there somewhere, the muscle memory of a life I used to live.
“No.”
Not because it isn't beautiful. It still is. But my life's somewhere else now, has been for years, and visiting is the right amount of Colorado I need.
“I like visiting,” I say.
“Me too.”
She reaches over and fixes the strap on my glove that I hadn't noticed was loose, automatic. The same way I know which pocket of her jacket holds her Chapstick without needing to ask. Ten years of this. Ordinary now, but none the less precious for it.
Two days later, we're loading the truck for the drive home, skis strapped down, both kids exhausted in the way only a full week of skiing manages. Ivy climbs into the passenger seat. I get behind the wheel.
My parents wave us off from the condo, already talking about visiting Montana in June. Wyatt's asleep before we clear the parking lot. Nora holds out another ten minutes, insisting she's not tired at all.
Music comes on somewhere near the pass. Nora stirs enough to ask, half-asleep, “Who sings this?”
“Chris Stapleton,” I say.
Ivy looks at me, something knowing in her expression as she reaches for the dial. “Okay. What about this one?”
“Seriously?”
“Maybe there's one you don't know.”
“Mom, Dad always knows,” Nora mumbles, eyes still closed.
“One day I'll get him,” Ivy says.
“You've been saying that for ten years.”
“I'm due.”
She leaves the station where it is, and I drive, mountains giving way slowly to plains, Colorado thinning out behind us mile by mile. Ivy reaches over at some point and takes my hand.
“Ready to go home?” she asks, quiet, mostly for me.
I look at her, then check the mirror, both kids asleep in the back seat.
“Yeah.”
I spent years behind a wheel like this one, driving toward the next assignment, the next town, the next temporary room, never once thinking twice about where the road ended. This drive's nothing like that. I know what's waiting at the other end of it.
Home.
The End.
I hope you enjoyed Beck and Ivy’s story!